Dating to the late ninth century B.C., the "I Ching or, Book of Changes" is one of the oldest of the Chinese classics. What began as a manual for divination, the "I Ching" has been transformed through thousands of years of commentary and interpretation into one of the principal works of eastern cosmology. The central part of the work is the divination text, an explanation of hexagrams, which may be produced through a process of cleromancy, a method of determining divine intent by the production of seemingly random numbers. Historically a casting of a bundle of stalks from the yarrow plant may have been used to produce the numbers, which would build up the hexagram. Also part of the "I Ching" canon is a set of commentaries referred to as the "ten wings", contained in the appendices of this volume. These commentaries are offered as a guide to moral decision making in interpreting the results of divination. The "I Ching", having informed the philosophies of Taoism and Confucianism, remains to this day as one of the most influential of all ancient Chinese texts. This edition is translated with annotations by James Legge.
